Allowing someone to push branches to the "central" repository versus requiring them to have forks of it is functionally the same thing, assuming you set up branch protection for master.
> assuming you set up branch protection for master.
Bad assumption. However, branch protection sounds cool. Will investigate it.
honest question: why don't they have push access?
Prior to 2 minutes ago, I had no idea you could lock down a branch in github. We have folks working on our codebase, and the team wants to enforce code-reviews for anything that goes into our master branch. To enforce this, only a few people have push access.
This is similar to the open-source maintainer model.